Defiant Gardens: Making
Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth Helphand, FASLA
Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas

"This research is unprecedented and--unfortunately--timely, as war is so prevalent now. It really gets to the core of what gardens are about and recognizes the primal need to grow food and beauty. It's incredibly moving to see signs of hope and life from past wars, much more touching than a memorial. Its ability to take this topic to a broader general marked is phenomenal. This proves that research doesn't need to be boring and drab."

Why is it that in the midst of a war,
one can still find gardens? Wartime gardens are dramatic
examples of defiant gardens—gardens created
in extreme social, political, economic, environmental,
or cultural conditions. This project, resulting in the
book, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime
examined gardens created in the midst of war in the
twentieth century—a period of the deadliest wars
in human history—including gardens soldiers built
behind the trenches in World War I; gardens built in
the Warsaw and other ghettos under the Nazis during
World War II; gardens in the POW and civilian internment
camps of both world wars; and gardens created by Japanese
Americans held in U.S. internment camps during World
War II. The book concludes with gardens in Bosnia and
those created by American soldiers in Iraq. This is
a work of both historical research and an investigation
of garden theory.

With the exception of the Japanese American
internment gardens these are places and phenomena that
have never been studied by landscape architects or historians.
For the investigation I relied entirely upon first person
accounts from garden makers’ diaries, memoirs,
and testimonies, or those who witnessed their creation
and use. I searched for both narrative accounts as well
as images. Most of the almost one hundred photographs
and many of the stories have never been published. The
research took the author to the archives of the Imperial
War Museum in London, the United States Holocaust Museum
and Memorial, the Shoah Foundation and Japanese American
National Museum in Los Angeles, YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research in New York, archives in France and Belgium,
the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Yad Vashem
in Jerusalem, and the Ghetto Fighters Museum at Kibbutz
Lohamet Hagetaot in Israel. I also gathered material
over the World Wide Web when I was unable to travel
to places such as Australia. Wherever possible I interviewed
the garden makers including Holocaust survivors, Japanese
American internees, former POWs, soldiers in Iraq, and
gardeners in Bosnia. While none of these gardens survive
I felt it was imperative to visit the sites of their
construction, thus I toured battlefields and cemeteries
on the Western Front in Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto, and
attended an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar. As a landscape
architect I wanted to be confidant about the historical
context for the research, thus each of the chapters
was read and critiqued by historians who are experts
in each of these areas.

Defiant gardens accentuate the essential
garden questions of the garden meaning and the relationships
between humans and the natural world. Psychologists
and philosophers learn about human behavior by examining
people in extreme circumstances of deprivation and hardship.
Similarly gardens in extreme situations may reveal essential
aspects of garden character and ideology. Gardens are
always defined by their context, perhaps the more difficult
the context, the more accentuated the meaning. Thus,
I examined gardens and war. Gardens promise beauty where
there is none, hope over despair, optimism over pessimism,
and finally, life in the face of death.

These wartime gardens accentuate the multiple
meanings of gardens - life, home, work, hope, and beauty
- five attributes that lie dormant in all gardens, awaiting
the catalyst that propels them to germinate and allowing
us to recognize them as defiant gardens. It is important
to note that gardens were important to people irrespective
of their scale, they could be a window box or a valley;
or their life span, from even a fleeting image to places
designed for posterity.

Gardens are about life, the fundamental
biophilic relationship that humans have with the natural
world. The products of the garden sustain us as both
food for our bodies and food for our psyches. They are
about home, as reminders of homes we have inhabited
as well as a way of transforming a place into a new
home, however temporary. Gardens are about work, accentuating
the fact that garden is a verb as well as a noun. As
both physical and mental labor, garden work can provide
the particular sense of identity and satisfaction that
comes from manual labor. Gardening is inherently hopeful
and optimistic as a series of affirmative and assertive
acts. The mere act of making a garden implies a future
in which plants will reach fruition and results will
be enjoyed. Gardens are about beauty. In war, the antithesis
of the beautiful – the common garden- may become
the highest art.

In trenches, ghettoes, and camps, defiant
gardens attempted to create normalcy in the midst of
madness and order out of chaos. In wartime, gardens are
the opposite of the pastoral retreat, they can be an
assertive attack, an act of resistance representing
a desire for survival and sanity. As soldiers can engage
in heroic acts, so too there are heroic gardens. In
this history there is material that can lead one
to despair, but there is also inspiration. These gardens
and the work of gardeners satisfy human needs at all
levels, from physical survival to the highest levels
of art and cultural achievement. During a time of war,
the garden as a symbol of peace carries added resonance.

War is the most extreme of human conditions,
but the observations regarding defiant gardens apply
to numerous circumstances: community gardens, school
gardens, prison gardens, therapeutic gardens, landscape
restoration, memorial design, as well as the gardens
of refugees, the homeless, and the grieving.

The reception to this research and its
dissemination has been heartening. One goal was to present
this research in a manner that would be useful and credible
to diverse constituencies. Reviews in academic, professional,
and popular publications have been unanimous in their
praise. The New Statesman named it one of their
best books of the year. The Oregonian one of
the ten best books by Northwest authors. It has also
been the subject of over twenty radio interviews equally
divided between public radio station interviews and
garden shows. Most notably, it was the subject of an
NPR piece on Memorial Day 2006 heard by ten million
listeners. In addition, the author has been asked to
speak at over twenty sites since publication at a combination
of universities, libraries, botanic gardens, and arboreta.
At almost every occasion there are audience members
who add new information, or who are profoundly affected
by the stories and conclusions of the work. The research
has already inspired other researchers to undertake
their own investigations. The author is planning a web
site to continue to gather material and expand its dissemination
as well as investigating the design and creation of
a traveling exhibit of this material.